A Room With a Spook

With the summer tourist season just around the corner, I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of the hotels in Charleston that offer more than just a comfortable place to rest your head – they also offer the possibility of you being visited by a supernatural being, or haint as the Lowcountry folks are fond of calling them.

So where can you go for this free amenity? First on the list is the Battery Carriage House, located in the heart of the historic district at 20 South Battery. Be sure to ask for room #8, for that’s where the weirdest going-ons seem to occur. Like waking up in the middle of the night to find yourself gazing at a headless torso, dressed in a Confederate soldier’s uniform. Make sure there is a female in the room if you want to experience this because it seems that this ghost, known as the “gentleman ghost”, prefers the opposite sex, although he will politely leave through a wall if they scream out in fear (guess that’s considered a gentlemanly thing to do in the spirit world).

Next on the list is the Embassy Suites Hotel in downtown Charleston, which is located within the walls of the old Citadel military college. When I say old, I mean old, as in the Civil War old. A ghost from this period is said to roam the hotel. He appears to be one of the Citadel’s cadets, a teenager who hasn’t got the news that the war has been over for quite some time and his side didn’t win. But the folks he’s paid a visit to say he seems happy and friendly (Casper would be proud). Not sure why he’s in such a good mood, though, considering he’s missing half his head. Yep, they say there is nothing but air from his eyebrows on up, as if his skull has been ripped off by a cannonball. Not sure about you, but that would tend to put me in a foul mood. But maybe death has taught him something the rest of us don’t know. Anyway, he has been seen so many times by employees of the hotel that they refuse to go near the area he haunts. Makes you feel sorry for the people in that section of the hotel that want room service, doesn’t it?

Last but not least on our list is a bed and breakfast located on Wentworth Street. Built in 1837, it is haunted by the ghost of a slave named George who died trying to swim after a boat that was taking his parents away. He’s quite a mischievous spirit and likes to shake the bed in one particular room and turn the lights on and off. But he also has a dark side, because many say they have heard the sound of a whip cracking in his presence, a sad reminder of how inhuman humans can be at times.

So now you know where to stay if you’re looking for a paranormal experience to go along with your fun day at the beach and visiting Charleston’s many attractions. But don’t ask the hotel owners for a refund if you don’t get spooked, for spirits can be a finicky bunch and may have something better to do than scare the you-know-what out of you on any particular night. But as a precaution, I’d ask for an extra roll of toilet paper when you check in … just in case they do scare the you-know-what out of you!

  

If you’ve taken one of the many ghost tours in Charleston, South Carolina, you have surely heard about Lavina Fisher, a woman who lived two hundred years ago. And when you get through reading this, you will thank your lucky stars that she lived back then and not now.

Lavina, along with her husband John, ran an inn known as the Six Mile House, appropriately named because it was six miles north of Charleston. This was back in the day when your main form of transportation consumed oats instead of gasoline. So Lavina and John had a lot of folks stop by for refreshments (think of it as the convenience store of the 1800’s) or to spend the night.

Lavina was a real looker, and she definitely had a way of charming the men folk who visited Six Mile House. This is all very well and good, except for the fact that she had another trait that wasn’t quite as pleasant – she liked to kill the men and steal all their possessions. She did this by serving them poison in their tea. Once the poison began taking effect, John would get into the act by escorting the poor victim to a bedroom, where he begged them to lie down and rest. Once they did, John left the room and pulled a lever which opened a trap door in the floor, spilling the bed and its occupant into a pit below the house. If the poison and fall didn’t finish the victim off, John would do the honors and dispose of the body.

This all worked well for our lovely couple until the evening a man by the name of John Peoples stopped by. Lavina did her normal thing and offered Peoples her ‘special’ tea. But Peoples wasn’t a fan of tea and poured the contents into a potted plant (wonder if the plant shriveled up and died?). Peoples also had enough smarts to realize that something wasn’t quite right with our beautiful but evil Lavina, so he politely excused himself and made his way to the guest bedroom for the evening.

Since he was just faking being tired, Peoples decided to sit in a chair in the room for a while and do whatever people back in those days did without TV, radio, and the internet to entertain them. While he sat there something really weird happened. You guessed right if you thought. “Oh, I bet the bed fell through the trap door!’

Can you imagine the look on People’s face? Bewildered, he threw open the door to his room and demanded that he receive 30,000 bonus points on his frequent visitor card for a less than satisfactory stay. Just kidding, of course. He hollered for someone to please explain to him what had just happened to his bed.

John came running to him and looked just as bewildered. After all, he thought Peoples should have been well on his way to meet his maker by now. And apparently Lavina couldn’t hide her disappointment that he wasn’t dead when she arrived on the scene, so People’s did what any of us would do – he got the hell out of Dodge, FAST! In fact, he was so scared that he ran all the way back to Charleston (wonder if he set a new world record for the fastest six-mile sprint?).

Once in the Holy City, Peoples went straight to the police and reported what had happened. The police went to Six Mile House, began snooping around, and found lots of bodies buried on the grounds, making Lavina Fisher the first female serial killer in U.S. history.

Now for the rest of the story …

Lavina and John were arrested and sentenced to hang. Lavina laughed at the sentence, knowing that married women were protected against execution in the Palmetto State ( a law that was in effect back then). The judge was shrewd though, and laughed right back at her and said, “Well, I’ll just hang your husband first, then you’ll be a widow. And it's perfectly legal to hang a widow in South Carolina."

So John was the first to meet his fate. He went peacefully to the gallows, but not our Lavina. No, she went kicking and screaming. Oh, and she wore a wedding dress, too, in the hopes that some dude in the crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle would fall madly in love with her and marry her on the spot, thus getting around that pesky widow clause.

Fat chance, Lavina. Men can be dumb sometimes around a beautiful woman, but not that dumb!

Resigned to her fate, Lavina spat and cursed at the crowd. Her last words were: “If you have a message you’d like me to carry to hell, give it to me—I’ll carry it.”

Maybe she did make it to hell. But there sure are a lot of people who say they have seen the ghost of Lavina in the Unitarian Church graveyard in Charleston. And in the jail cell she once occupied.

So if you see poor old Lavina on some spooky moonlit night, be sure to say hello to her and ask her how that trap door thing worked out for her. And next time you check into a hotel, be sure to look underneath your bed. You never know what Lavina’s descendents may be up to these days.
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NOT ALL THE IRISH ARE LUCKY!

Okay, it's time to celebrate St. Patty's Day with a ghost story that comes to us all the way from Ireland. In fact, it is considered to be the most famous Irish ghost tale of all.

According to the tale, a brother and a sister made a pact with each other. They decided that the first one to die would reappear to the other one to confirm that there is indeed life after death. The brother was the first to go (not sure how old he was at the time), and appeared to his sister shorlty afterward. Now this was no ordinary ghost, because to prove to his sister that he was real, he gripped her wrist so hard that it deformed it (ouch!). He also had a few things to tell her about the future. First, he predicted that her husband would die and that she would re-marry. Second, he predicted that she would die on her 47th birthday (he was just full of good news, wasn't he?).

Well, lo and behold, everything the brother predicted came true. Except for that little thing he had to say about his sister dying on her 47th birthday. She made it through the whole day and the rest of the year breathing just fine. So to celebrate her apparent victory over death, she had a big wing-ding for her 48th birthday. One of the guests was a clergyman. When she saw him she said something like, "Hey, look at me, I'm forty-eight and my heart is still ticking. So much for my dead brother's lousy prediction abilities."

This is when the clergyman gave her a curious look and said, "Forty-eight? Why, my dear, you're only forty-seven."

I can only imagine the look on the woman's face at this point. If she were in today's age, she would probably say something like, "What have you been smoking?"

The clergyman hadn't been smoking anything. What he had done was look at the registry of her birth before he had come to the wing-ding.

Witnesses say the woman proclaimed that the clergyman had signed her death warrant, went to her chamber (yes, they called rooms chambers back then), made out her will, had a heart attack, and died on the spot.

So was the brother's prediction true ... or did the woman get so scared that she gave herself a fatal coronary? Guess we'll never know.

Either way, I wish you a happy St. Patrick's Day and hope your luck runs a lot deeper than the poor woman's in our story!

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A Writer's Confession

The other day someone asked me which one of my novels I liked the best.  Good grief, that’s like asking a parent which one of their children they like the most. The politically correct answer, of course, is that I like them all equally. But I’d be lying if I said that. And since my novels aren’t really children and don’t have emotions, I can give you an honest answer: my favorite is A Lone Palm Stands.

Maybe it’s because I lived with that book for three years, creating the story, refining the story, refining the refining, and tweaking it. Then I tweaked it some more. Many people don’t realize this, but the original A Lone Palm Stands was twice the length of the published version. Twice. Nearly 1000 pages long! One of the hardest things I had to do was eliminating all those pages. But it was also the best thing I could do for the story.

But I have to admit that it was a labor of love. Giving A.J. her voice allowed me to go back in time to 1989 and remember what it was like in the days before and after Hurricane Hugo. The world seemed more innocent then, and in many ways it was. 9-11 had not happened yet. Cell phones were still a novelty and not all that reliable. A 19” TV was considered to be a wide-screen television. And music—Lord, how different that was! Madonna and Milli Vanilli were topping the charts. The world just seemed more fun and carefree.

That is, until Hugo came along.

For Charlestonians and others that call the South Carolina coast their home, Hugo changed everything. In the blink of its powerful eye, the storm turned our world upside down and left us with a devastated landscape. Homes were destroyed. People were killed. All seemed lost.

But then we remembered who we were—the descendents of a proud, independent breed of people who had seen it all:  a war that had pitted brother against brother, earthquakes , fires, and storms that were even more ferocious than Hugo. With our heritage in mind, we pulled together and proudly declared, “Come hell or high water, we will survive.” And by golly, survive we did.

We rebuilt our city by the sea, determined to make the Lowcountry a better place than it was before. And we succeeded. Today Charleston and her sea islands stand proud and beautiful, a testament to the resiliency and determination of those who faced the morning after Hugo with tears in their eyes, wondering why their little slice of heaven had become the scene of an unimaginable nightmare.

I say all this because I hope that A Lone Palm Stands captures the way our innocence was abruptly ended by Hugo, and the way that experiencing the storm and its aftermath made us all stronger than we were before. I hope that it also demonstrates, through the symbolic use of Sara, that good things can from the bad, and that we should never lose hope.

That’s why I love A Lone Palm Stands the most. But please don’t let Saving Sara and Savannah Grace find out. They might get jealous and plan evil things against their big sister :)

THE SUMMERVILLE LIGHT

The Summerville Light.  Anyone who has grown up in the lowcountry of South Carolina has heard of this mysterious phenomenon. And if you are brave and curious, you might have ventured out to  Sheep Island Road around midnight, to discover for yourself if the whole thing is fact or fantasy. From what I understand, some have even lived to tell about it :)

According to legend, the whole thing started when a railroad engineer lost his life in a train derailment. His death caused his widow to go a little loco, and she began wandering the tracks at night, lantern in hand, searching for her lost husband. Even after her death, people swear they still see the light of her lantern around midnight, moving eerily up and down the tracks and the roads near them.

Not sure if any of this has its basis in reality, considering the way Lowcountry folks love to spin a good tale that gets taller as the years go by. But one thing is for sure: something is going on in Summerville around Sheep Island Road that defies explanation.  

Here’s a first-hand account that I found online of what it’s like to find yourself face to face with the Summerville Light from a former member of the U.S. Air Force:

While stationed at Charleston Air Force Base in 1969, a few of my fellow airmen were sitting around the barracks rec-room watching the local TV. There was a story broadcast about a strange occurrence being reported by some people in the nearby town of Summerville. The reporter called it the Summerville Light.

Five guys with nothing to do and all with a relatively normal sense of curiosity quickly decided to jump in one of the groups GTO and go to Summerville to check out what we all just heard about on the TV.

We followed the brief directions given by the reporter to a dirt logging road that ran parallel to interstate 26 through a stretch of partially cleared pulp wood (yellow Pine) stand. We drove about a half mile down the road (as reported by some of the people interviewed in the broadcast) and waited. We left the car running with the air conditioner blowing because it was still hot and humid. Our attempt to put the windows down while we waited was quickly thwarted by an onslaught of mosquitos.

We waited about 30 minutes but we didn't see a thing and our patience was running thin due to the boredom of just sitting on a dark dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We were about to turn around and leave when we spotted a small dot of light that seemed to be about a mile away.

To our surprise, the small dot rapidly got larger and larger as it appeared to approach our car. As it got closer we could tell it wasn't on the dirt road but seemed to be just off the roadway. We could also begin to distinguish the color as a greenish glow very similar to what you get if you activated one of those chemical light sticks.

Within a few seconds, the green ball of light had approached to about 100 feet of the front of the car. It hoovered off the ground about 3 feet or so and the light pulsated slowly at first, them began to increase the pulsing to 2 or 3 times a second. Suddenly it shot forward and stopped right at the front of the car. At that point we all were about to dirty our pants. I was sitting in the front passengers seat and one of the three in the back yelled to the driver to get the hell out of there now !

About the time my friend put his hand on the gear shift lever, the ball of light moved forward so that it looked as if it was embedded in the hood. Suddenly, the motor stopped running, I remember looking over and seeing the red alternator light on and the "CHECK ENGINE" light. It couldn't have been a half second later and all the electrical power in the car died. No dash lights, no engine warning lights and the radio went silent.

The light edged forward very slowly at first. As it got closer to all of us inside, the cars interior took on the color of the ball and the temperature inside the car began to get very cold. So cold that the moisture that had accumulated on the inside of the windows from having the A/C on began to freeze and within a blink of your eye, all the windows were completely covered over by frost. Not exactly what you'd expect on a hot, muggy South Carolina night in the middle of August.

The ball of light was nearly at the edge of the windshield and still moving forward towards us. I scooted out of it's apparent path down the middle of the car and watched scared stiff as the green pulsating light moved into the passenger compartment. It was extremely bright now that it was just inches from our horrified faces. I don't remember hearing anyone saying anything but I do remember that all my friends looked like they had been painted with glow in the dark paint. Also, it seemed funny that everyones breath was fogging as if we were sitting in the middle of a giant walk in freezer . The ball of light proceeded to pass through the car rather slowly at first. It stopped just aft of the front seat and directly in front of the back seat.

All most immediately after it passed through the car , the frost on the windows vanished and a full display of ignition warning lights and the dashboard lights illuminated. We saw the ball of light stop about three feet from the trunk, and reverse direction, heading right back toward us again. This time as it entered the passenger compartment, the temperature inside the car remained comfortable. The frost on the windows had disappeared and the cars headlights came back on.

As soon as the ball of light exited the car, The engine cranked up without anyone touching the ignition . The ball stopped directly in front of the car again and for no apparent reason, the pulsating light stopped as well. With one last blinding flash of light, the whole thing sped off in the same direction if first appeared from. As soon as it disappeared back into the distant darkness, the radio blared to life again.

It didn't take long for our driver to shift into gear and turn the car around to make a hasty exit! not a word was spoken between us for the entire ride back to the base. For that matter, we didn't tell anyone about our experience except to call that reporter who did the original story to report what we had experienced.

Scientists have tried to explain this phenomenon away by claiming that it is nothing more than swamp gas. Really? I’ve never heard of swamp gas acting the way this person described or the way others have described the Light.  So what is really going on here?

All I can do is shrug my shoulders and wonder like the rest of you. And maybe, just maybe, one night when I work up enough courage to venture down Sheep Island Road at midnight, I might have my own personal experience to share with you.

Of course, if anyone else would like to volunteer to give us a first hand account …. well, be my guest.  I will be glad to feature an interview with you in one of my future blogs. That is, if you live to tell about it (can you hear Vincent Price’s laughter in the background?)

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The Folly Boat

One of the ‘main characters’ of my most recent novel, Savannah Grace, is a boat. Not just any boat, mind you, but a very special boat affectionately known as the Folly Boat.

Anyone who has traveled to Folly Beach, South Carolina in recent years has more than likely seen the boat. It sits on a narrow shoulder of land just past the Piggly Wiggly, bordered by marshland on one side and a two-laned highway (Folly Road) on the other. If you’re driving down Folly Road you can’t help but notice the dogone thing since it will undoubtedly have a  brightly painted message written across its hull—a message that changes daily, if not hourly.

So how did all this get started? And why is the boat there in the first place? Glad you asked. Stand by to be enlightened.

The boat, about thirty feet in length, washed up alongside the road in 1989 during Hurricane Hugo. No one ever claimed it, so the locals decided to adopt it and make it a shrine to the storm. I suppose it was their way of saying, "You might have destroyed our houses and reeked havoc on our little island, Hugo, but we will survive just like this boat did.”

It didn’t take long for someone to get the bright idea to take a spray gun to the boat and paint a message across its hull, visible to all the traffic going up and down Folly Road. The idea caught on quick, and before long a different message could be found on the boat each day, mostly happy birthday wishes and spouses exposing their love of their better half on  wedding anniversaries. In fact, on summer weekends, it's not uncommon for a message to last just a few hours before someone else comes along and paints a new one. But woe to anyone who tries to paint a commercial message on the boat. If you do, the good folks on Folly will hunt you down and pour a gallon of whitewash paint over your head, then hand you another gallon and politely ask you to cover the message, pronto. It’s for anniversaries, birthdays, and ‘welcome homes’, and not to be used for profit. To do so would be an insult to the spirit of the boat.

Anyway, all this got me to thinking one day, and this little light bulb appeared above my head that whispered to me, “Hey, wouldn’t it be a cool story plot if one of your characters found threatening messages addressed to them on the boat? Especially if no one was supposed to know they were in town?"

A smile crossed my lips and I thanked the light bulb. Then I spent the next year writing Savannah Grace.

So next time you’re headed to Folly, be sure to take a look at the boat. You never know what kind of crazy message it might display. But also take a moment to remember why the boat is there: it’s a monument to all those who braved the fury of Hurricane Hugo’s killer winds and lived to tell about it -- and went on to rebuild their homes and lives and discover a strength they never knew they had. 

Long live The Boat!

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The Ghosts of Granby Mills

Although ghost stories abound in the lowcountry of South Carolina, there are many other locations throughout the state where you can find some mighty strange happenings. Today I’d like to tell you about one such place that lies a few miles from the sacred football grounds of Williams Brice Stadium in Columbia (not that I’m a huge Gamecocks fan or anything like that).

The place is known as Granby Mills. As the name implies, it used to be a textile mill, and from I understand it was something to behold. Built in 1897 (contrary to popular belief I wasn’t around back then), it was the first mill to be powered by an off-site source of hydroelectric power. But it also took people—lots of people—to run the machines. Believe it or not, a good many of those people were kids. Yes, I said kids, some as young as eight years old. Don’t get mad at me, I’m just the storyteller. Apparently child labor was perfectly acceptable back in Granby’s hey-day.

If that’s not enough to get you riled up, just wait until you hear the rest of this. Those kids had to work some really long hours, up to twelve hours a day. And if they showed any sign of slacking off, they got told that they would be shoved into one of the huge on-site furnaces and cremated live. Talk about negative motivation! Can you imagine being eight years old and told such a thing? I’d work until I dropped from exhaustion, and that’s just what the overseers were hoping for (I’ll reserve my opinion of the overseers because I want to keep this blog ‘G’ rated).

Anyway, there is no evidence that any of the children were actually fed to the furnace. Notice I said “no evidence.” There were plenty of rumors, though, and it is documented that many of the children went missing. Some say that those were the ones that died from exhaustion and the mill managers decided it would be better to ‘dispose’ of their bodies than to explain to the authorities what had really happened to them. Some speculate that the furnaces could have been used for this purpose.

Now, fast-forward to today. Someone came along and decided that the historic mill building would make a great place for nearby USC students to stay. So it was made into an apartment building. Bet you can tell where this is headed, can’t you?

Yep, the building is haunted. Residents often hear the sounds of children crying and furnaces firing. Feet can be heard running across the floors. Objects in locked places are rearranged. Even more frightening, images of small hands and faces are seen in the moisture of fogged windows. Gulp!

Don’t know about you, but the whole thing gives me the chills. Thank God we don’t treat our children like that today. They are the most precious gift bestowed upon us and deserve to have a happy childhood. Shame on those overseers for taking advantage of their gullibility and scaring the you-know-what out of them. I hope they found a few fires of their own to burn in when they gave up the ghost.

Coming up next: More stories to keep you from sleeping at night :)

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